Port Jefferson Resident Explores Dominican Heritage

Students and administrators from Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, N.Y., recently made a pilgrimage following St. Dominic de Guzman missionary trail  taken over 800 years ago in France. 

Asma Neblett of Port Jefferson Station, N.Y., a media studies – journalism major who is president of the Black Student Union; and Sarah Favata of Northvale, N.J., history major on the childhood education track who is president of a children’s literature club for prospective teachers, along with other faculty and administrators took the trip to France to experience the voyage first hand. 

According to the university website, Mount Saint Mary College, education attempts to illuminate the human spirit: always open to relationship with God and one’s fellow human beings. The tradition of St. Dominic’s order includes respectful dialogue and the search for “veritas” (truth) in all facets of study and life.

To instill this type of human spirit, the group of students really got to explore what it was like during the time of St. Dominic's life. They got to visit the home where Dominic briefly lived, see the ruins of his first community of nuns that was formed back in 1206, and explore Toulouse, where Dominic founded the Order of Preachers, a Catholic Church.

“The experience was very powerful, but very humbling too – it was faith in a very raw form,” said Neblett. For more than a week, “We got to live it, to act it out. The experience brought longevity and authenticity to the message of being a Dominican at the Mount.”